In her novel The Beautiful Possible, Amy Gottlieb melds the everyday and the mystic by showing the secret lives and troubled pasts of rabbis, scholars, and their loved ones. Gottlieb graduated from Clark University in 1980 with a BA in English and earned her MA in comparative literature from the University of Chicago in 1982. She then moved to New York, where she published her first short story, “The Rosalind Quartet,” in 1988. After four years in Berkeley, where she taught high school English, she returned to Manhattan in 1992 and began working as a freelance editor. In 1998 she became director of publications for the Rabbinical Assembly, the professional organization of Conservative rabbis, and in 2004 she launched its imprint Aviv Press, which published books on Jewish spirituality for a popular audience. She also began writing poetry, publishing pieces in The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry and journals including Lilith, the Forward, and Other Voices, and she received fellowships from both the Bronx Council on the Arts and the Drisha Institute. In 2016 Gottlieb published The Beautiful Possible, a novel about suburban rabbis and New Age gurus struggling with love, faith, and doubt in the wake of the Holocaust. The novel was a finalist for the 2016 National Jewish Book Award, the 2016 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2017 Ribalow Prize.